Wednesday, October 02, 2013
Almost all Android OEMs Cheat on Mobile Benchmarks

A report found that that almost every Android smartphone manufacturer is shipping devices that have been optimized to perform better in benchmarks, in an effort to gain an edge over competitive devices.

Earlier this week Apple SVP Phil Schiller pointed at a story that Samsung was artificially inflating benchmark scores for its new Galaxy Note 3. The same issue was discovered by AnandTech for the Galaxy S4 back in July. But today the site published an extensive report showing that almost every Android smartphone manufacturer is shipping devices that do the same.

According to the web site, the HTC One, HTC One mini, LG G2, Galaxy Tab 10.1, and many others are "cheating" a benchmarks. After detacting the presence of certain benchmarks, the devices were raising thermal limits (and thus max GPU frequency) or were driving CPU voltage/frequency to their highest state in order to gain an edge.

The report claims that Apple and Motorola, as well as Google's Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 devices are not following these tactics.

As noted in the report, the gains that OEMs are experiencing from the inflated scores are probably not worth the bad press they are currenty receiving.AnandTech points out that most of the inflated scores provide under a 10% increase in GPU and CPU performance benchmarks.